Review by Martha Quillen
Italian Immigrants – May 2000 – Colorado Central Magazine
Westward the Immigrants – Italian Adventurers and Colonists In An Expanding America
by Andrew Rolle
Originally published as The Immigrant Upraised
by the University of Oklahoma Press, 1968
Published in 1999
by the University Press of Colorado
ISBN 0-87081-529-6
IF I WERE REVIEWING THIS as a movie, I’d probably give it that noncommittal rating: a mixed bag. But that’s primarily because I suspect our readers will feel this book contains more than they want to know about Italians in other states, less than they’d like to know about Italians in Colorado, and very little about Italians in our own region.
On the whole, however, Westward is an eminently readable book, straightforward in style and full of engaging information. Although in places the book settles into tedious particulars about other places and people, I suspect those passages can be easily skimmed — since the book also includes some colorful anecdotes, poignant first-person accounts, and intriguing facts.
In the preface the author explains that he wanted to tell the story of the Italians who migrated westward because he felt their experiences were different than those of the typically portrayed inner-city immigrant. Rolle starts his history, though, with the country that all Italian immigrants left behind.
Rolle, who speaks Italian, presents information from the travel books and newspaper reports that lured Italians to America, and simultaneously presents an effective portrait of the conditions in Italy that urged emigration.
“One of the most amusing of all travel accounts was Un Viaggio del Far West Americano, by Giovanni Vigna del Ferro, who was in the United States for four years beginning in 1876,” Rolle writes.
“At Leadville, then the center of the West’s mining frontier, Vigna del Ferro found a ratio of thirty men to one woman. He thought its muddy streets might be improved if both men and women did not rely almost entirely on horses for transportation. His account speaks of law and order and of lynch law, recording the presence of only a few Italians working in the mines. He believed Leadville would not grow large because the town was more than 10,000 feet in elevation, and he thought domestic animals, including dogs, could not live there…”
Well, maybe not everything written by those travel writers lured Italians westward, but in writing about Italy Rolle says:
“In time whole towns were literally split in two, half their population in Italy, the rest on the other side of the ocean. In 1901 the mayor of the South Italian town of Molterno, introducing Italy’s visiting prime minister, said: ‘I greet you in the name of eight thousand fellow citizens, three thousand of whom are in America, and the other five thousand preparing to follow them.'”
One section of Westward is divided by western states, and this is where I found the book a little disappointing — since Colorado, for obvious reasons, doesn’t glean near as many pages as California. In this section Rolle often goes into the histories of individual families, towns, buildings, experimental agricultural communities, etc.
Colorado, however, has the dubious distinction of generating some of the most violent incidents in Rolle’s book. “At Gunnison in 1890 and at Denver in 1893, Italians were lynched,” he writes. Apparently a few days after the lynching rumors started circulating that 300 Italians were on their way to burn Gunnison down, about which Rolle writes:
“Although the Italians never carried out this rumored threat, Gunnison’s residents believed them capable of doing so. Colorado violence was not, of course, restricted to acts against the Italians…
“The fact that this incident involved a foreigner, and thus seemed exotic, was probably the main reason it was recorded for posterity. Similarly, the account of so startling an event as a quadruple murder in Denver by four Italians during 1875 had fascinated local newspaper readers.”
Again and again in this book, the author tends to minimize the consequences of discrimination. This is almost certainly because this book was written in the 1960s and called The Immigrant Upraised in response to an Oscar Handlin volume called The Uprooted (1952). Apparently, Handlin’s book concludes that immigrants were exploited, mistreated, charged high interest rates, and relegated to marginal work opportunities.
IN HIS PREFACE, Rolle writes, “This present-minded approach renders a disservice to the memory of those many immigrants who died proud of their achievements after years of hard work and personal sacrifice.”
Rolle’s theme seems to be that Italians actually fared very well in America, and although I’m sure there’s truth in that, Rolle’s tendency to dismiss troubles no doubt does a disservice to those who were lynched or mistreated. It also doesn’t serve the reader who is curious about events at places like Ludlow — since although Rolle dutifully records such events, he sure doesn’t waste too much space on details.
Writing American history has got to be tough. Nobody ever seems to like anybody else’s approach to it. Actually, though, I didn’t mind Rolle’s approach — except that it is somewhat dated. Rolle’s insistence that the immigrants’ hard work was met with just rewards, and that their eventual destiny was success, is rather heartening.
But unfortunately, in his drive to prove that Italians did well, Rolle sometimes ends up sounding as though he’s trying to prove that they were worthy, and occasionally he comes perilously close to sounding like that hoary old maxim, “They were a credit to their race.” This book, however, was originally written in 1968, and we can only hope that no one today would have the audacity to claim that Italians were unworthy.
Although Rolle doesn’t avoid discussing discrimination, he certainly dodges the complexities of it. He reveals that many Italians disliked the South where they were hired en masse because it was believed that white workers were more productive than black workers. With a certain naive pride, the author shows how Italians really did work harder, sometimes planting and picking by lantern light. But this turn of the century tendency to pit ethnic groups against one another, praising one and casting aspersions on another, was destructive. In the long run, most Italians fled the South where working conditions were brutal, and blacks were left behind to live with the impossible standards of long hours, low pay, and terrible treatment.
All in all, the reader is sure to notice that political correctness has changed, and at times this book seems curiously old-fashioned. But that doesn’t really detract from the anecdotes or information. The best thing about this book is the vast collection of amusing and unusual sources. So I’ll end with a particularly bizarre quote from Father John Nobili, a missionary in Oregon in 1844. Of his missionary activities he wrote:
“I was there alone among 8 or 9 thousand Indians of different languages and manners. In all, I think I baptized and gave the other sacraments to nearly one thousand three or four hundred Indians, many of whom had the happiness to die soon afterward, including about five hundred children carried off by the measles.”
— Martha Quillen